


the men are called horsemen there

by arbitrarily



Series: horizon line [1]
Category: Black Sails
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Hate Sex, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Post-Season/Series 03
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-02 17:18:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,562
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6575095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Violence precedes any treaty. Flint returns to Nassau; Billy's ready.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the men are called horsemen there

**Author's Note:**

> Title from [the Sunset Rubdown song of the same title](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7EyqBVFhbs) (that I pretty much listened to exclusively while writing). Major thanks to everyone who listened to me shout into the void while I chipped away at this (in particular, you, Morgan, aka the one got me to watch this pirate show in the first place). This was originally way longer and more plot-driven, but I think it works better as a series rather than one crazy long fic, lol, which god only knows how long it would've taken me to finish. So, uh, be on the lookout for a part two (or more?) someday. 
> 
> General spoilers for the series through the end of season three, as well as some winking oblique spoilers for _Treasure Island_. General canon-compliant content warnings apply.

 

 

 

I said if I was a horse I would throw up the reins,  
if I was you.  
SUNSET RUBDOWN

 

 

  

Billy is asleep when he arrives.

Flint’s return to the island befits his status as legend: he arrives alone, ungraspable as an apparition, a thief in the night.

Billy had heard the reports of the _Walrus_ spotted outside the harbor earlier that day. He had assumed he would be summoned, too risky for Flint to chance stopping here. But that’s not the truth, is it. He’s revising – he is lying – already. Of course Flint would come to him, of course there would be next to nothing, not even the promise of his neck and the noose, to keep him from returning to what he called his home. Though hardly a homecoming there to greet him by an stretch: Rogers’s men and the Royal British Navy alert and at the ready, the few guards Billy has littered along the main road heading inland, and the even fewer spies he has planted down at the beach. And there is Billy, asleep and alone on the floor of the Barlow woman’s house. 

They made her home the base of their operations. They had found the house ransacked, the appearance of rough-hewn formality and propriety ruined by looters and the elements prior to their arrival. The broken latch on the storm shutter bangs against the side of the window as the wind whips up, a steady beat Billy has learned to ignore.

Early days, and Ben Gunn had tried to scare off the minister who came calling. Billy had watched the exchange from the shade of the porch – the minister who emerged amidst the crops at the edge of the property, the hesitation and uncertainty obvious in the slump of his shoulders, calling into question any pretense of divine ordinance. The minister spoke, not to Ben, but to Billy. “Were you acquainted with the late Mrs. Barlow?” he had called to him.

“In a manner of speaking,” he had said, and found that it was true. It was: no lies, if only by omission.

It doesn’t feel right to sleep in any of the beds in her house, so Billy doesn’t. He tells himself that comfort is an unnecessary luxury. That it’s strange to be in a house instead of a ship. It’s the longest he’s been off a ship, in a house, in years; he has found that if he misses anything it’s the boxed-in feeling of being a ship alone at sea. He’s found it’s funny how being on land brings all his accrued aches and pains into stark relief. There’s the stiff shoulder that pops occasionally, a persistent ache in his hip, as if he has double the years he has lived. Triple. His joints crack and muscles pull when he rises each morning from the small nest of blankets he has made his bed in the main room of this woman’s home. The unyielding floor feels good under his sore back. He sleeps better at sea, but he has managed to make do here: the rebellion in Nassau rages on, Billy both its author and its makeshift general. It’s easy enough to believe he controls all of this, to fashion that as a truth.

Here is the truth, he thinks: he had known Flint would come to him. He had known, when he turned the men out of the house and into the tavern, the brothel, when he set the guards. When he closed his eyes. He would come.

It’s the best he’s slept in weeks.

 

 

 

 

 

The last time Billy saw Flint they were on the beach. The treasure was waiting, Vane had been captured, and Flint handed Billy the reins. 

The last thing he said to him were not words at all but rather a nod exchanged, the same as a handshake, a deal struck. And then, the two of them were off to fight separate fronts of the same war. Flint took to the water and Billy headed inland. He mounted the horse and with one single glance behind him he rode. The sun was in his eyes and he squinted, saw nothing more than the scatter of men ankle-deep in the surf, Flint caught in the glare. He rode on, and the same words beat in him over and over again, beat to match the horse’s hooves against the dirt, to match the steady hammer of his own heart. He knew them as a separate promise.

If he can’t trust him, he’ll have to –

 

 

 

 

 

He is asleep when Flint arrives. 

Billy wakes to a sharp nudge at his bare shoulder. He opens his eyes to the toe of a boot. He jerks away, instinct and adrenaline coursing through him, blinking fast as he glances up. Above him, Flint looks like something from a story Billy would tell and spread: the captain looming in the dark, a lantern lit and held aloft, his face hollowed and emptied out by shadow, as if he had escaped the grave and his sepulchral journey has brought him here. 

“She was a civilized woman. There are beds, you know.”

The dry, droll tone is familiar, but Billy feels for the pistol he keeps under his pillow all the same.

Flint smirks down at him, offers a quick shake of his head. He holds his arms out and away from his body as he steps back, the lantern swinging, the light trembling in the dark room. “That’ll hardly be necessary. I come empty-handed.” He places the lantern down on the table. 

“Hardly the same thing as peace,” Billy grumbles, more to himself than to Flint. Flint must hear him; Billy catches the small upwards tic at the corner of his mouth. He sighs, rises to his feet gingerly, the gun left behind. Would Flint wake him merely to shoot him dead? Yes, Billy thinks. Yes he would. He can feel Flint watching him, so he ignores him. He grabs for the shirt he left draped on the back of the chair and pulls it on.

“Should you even be here?” he asks Flint. He looks at him when he asks the question and he’s greeted by what he expected: that cool and careful assessment Billy knows far too well. Billy takes a seat in the chair, the table before him littered with empty cups, blank pages, a book from the Barlow woman’s collection. Flint’s lantern. Flint does not join him.

Flint shrugs. “Enough of them still think me dead.”

“Depends on who you ask.” Though Flint is not entirely wrong. Despite the ascent of Long John Silver and through no effort by Billy, Flint has taken on a mythology of his own. The men at the beach all believe Flint a dead man walking. They are the hardest men and the men most susceptible to gossip. Men like them live for myth, if only out of the half-baked promise that given enough plunder and enough blood to stain their name they too will earn their own tales. They see sorcery in the most mundane of motivations and they will act on their fears, making it all the easier to warp them to a silver tongue’s design. They believe that Flint is dead, or he is half-dead, a monstrosity that the Devil himself saw fit to chase from the gates of Hell, his pitchfork ablaze, protecting the damned from Captain Flint’s reign. 

“They come up with that themselves?” Billy had asked when Jacob recounted this tale.

“Lot of former missionaries down on the beach these days.” Jacob had smiled. “Looking for a new lord to serve.”

Billy’s grin had been grim in reply. “Aren’t we all.”

And now, here he is: Captain Flint, alive, in the flesh. Alive, though seemingly worse for the wear. In the dim light Billy can see the dark circles under his eyes, exhaustion etching itself into the paper-thin skin around them. The same lines are wrinkled into his forehead, around his mouth. There’s a yellowing bruise along his jaw and a healing though still angry-looking cut at his temple, another across the bridge of his nose. 

He meets Flint’s eye. It’s like the start of any duel, he thinks with amused dread. Distant thunder sounds, out on the water. Billy can feel the change in atmospheric pressure in here, too. The humidity hangs thick, oppressive and claustrophobic, contributing to the already high tensions running between them. It’s as if it’s always been right there, that current of violence, right there under the surface, waiting to break. Blood too close to the skin, blood too close to the boiling point. The war rages in Nassau, the war at sea, the war that started a long time ago between the both of them. 

Flint begins to pace around the table. Billy can tell: Flint is holding himself in check. A stiffness settles into his own shoulders as he follows his progress, forwards, back again. The floorboards creak under Flint’s heavy footfall and he pauses behind the chair across the table from Billy. 

“I have to ask you, Billy,” he finally says, too conversational to be trusted, “and I don’t even know where the fuck to begin. What in the fucking merciless hell were you thinking?”

Billy bites down on an entirely inappropriate smile. He scrubs at his face, briefly hiding his mouth. He takes this, his moment of apprehension, and does nothing with it. He drops his hand away, raises his chin as he leans back in his chair. “Afraid I’ll have to beg you to be a bit more specific than that.”

“Silver?” Flint rages. “You named Silver as the face of our resistance? You took a man with absolutely no experience at captaincy and fashioned him as leader? Of us?”

“Oh,” Billy says. He keeps his voice slow, he keeps his face blank. “That.”

He’s impressed with himself, if only for how speechless Flint appears. As if he expected a denial from Billy, perhaps even an apology. The thought of Flint heading out here, risking certain death or at the least capture to get what he believes he deserves from him – Billy feels his own temper stir, a dulled reflection of Flint’s own furious exhibition. 

“Was this – revenge? Is that what this is? Because, fuck, Billy, you play a long con.”

Billy narrows his eyes. “Revenge? No.” He leans forward, his arm out across the table. “When I put forth Silver’s name, not a man in this room challenged it. What does that tell you.” He’s changing the narrative, and he knows it. He can remember Featherstone asking him, why not Flint. And he can remember his own reply. The truth, though, is flexible when it can be shaped to give you the results you want. Billy knows this. After all, he learned it from him. 

“It tells me you didn’t do your goddamn job, Billy. I didn’t leave you behind here to fuck me over.”

Billy’s eyes flash at this, the assumption of his loyalty. That it is to him, and not the men. For so long the loyalty shared between them was a one-sided exchange: Billy trusted Flint to do what was right by the men and for their futures. He wants to tell him how that loyalty warps when you come to expect something in return. How any relationship is altered once you realized you are owed more than you have ever received. That your worth has been undervalued and you have come to collect.

“You left me behind to do what’s best for Nassau.”

“I am what’s best for Nassau!” Flint shouts.

“You really believe that, don’t you.” Billy’s voice is quiet; he stares back at Flint’s face, frozen in outrage. 

“And you believe it to be Silver?” Flint laughs, hard and unfriendly, his teeth bared. “You have no idea – no idea, what you have done, do you? Were you not there the night he caved in Dufresne’s head?”

Billy crosses his arms over his chest. “Would you care for me to compose an itemized list of your own various crimes? We can start with murder, both attempted and realized, including my own and Mr. Gates’s, and work our way down to petty larceny.”

Flint’s voice is still cold but has gone softer when he speaks. “And you say this has nothing to do with revenge.”

“It doesn’t.” Funny how Billy finds he means that. “Memory’s hardly the same thing as vengeance. Merely makes a man wiser. Informs his decisions.”

“He has wisdom now, does he.”

Flint takes a seat at the table. He is seated at the same table where Billy wrote the legend of Long John Silver, a fact hardly lost on him. It does little to diminish the sense that Flint fills this entire room, not just with his anger, but him, as a man. There are very few rooms he has entered that he has not commanded. Billy decides this will not be one of them. He wants to believe he’s dangerous now, too.

 

 

 

 

 

The rain has begun to lash against the roof. For a long moment, it is the only sound as Billy and Flint sit in expectant silence. It’s not a competition, Billy thinks, but Flint breaks first. 

“Explain it to me then, your reasons for coronating Silver.” Flint says it bluntly, accusation built into the heavy sarcasm of his tone.

“I had grown weary of us playing roles in your story.” Billy stretches his legs under the table, relaxes into his reply. 

Flint glares at him, the expression breaking into a small glimpse of humor. “Listen to you. One Scheherazade casting the other out in the hope of a better tale.”

Billy frowns, which only makes Flint’s smirk deepen.

“We were writing Nassau’s future,” Billy says. “Not its past.”

Flint’s mouth twists into a mean snarl, but that wry amusement is still there. “Is this your way of telling me I'm past my prime?”

Billy doesn’t say anything; he merely raises his eyebrows, offers what he knows to be a shit-eating grin. 

Flint hunches forward, his face stormy and focused. “Was this always your design? You oust me, uphold Silver, and there you are, awarded whatever it is you think you might receive from this?” Billy doesn’t say a word, finds there is nothing for him to say. “Was Silver aware of this?” Flint asks, the intensity of the question sudden and unexpected.

“No,” Billy says, taken aback despite himself, both by the question and how little Flint does to hide his sense of betrayal. That it matters to him that Silver might have planned this with him. Without Flint. That Billy had answered before he even considered how he might use this to his advantage.

Flint sits back, if not appeased then satisfied enough. “The damnedest part of all this?” Flint says slowly. “Rather recently I found myself engaged in a similar conversation as this with our own Long John Silver himself.”

Billy watches him, curious. Flint speaks of Silver with a begrudging fondness Billy doesn’t quite know what to do with. It reminds him of how Silver would speak of Flint, as if he was surprised and disappointed by any bit of goodwill he might have felt for him.

It reminds him of Silver, back when they had been captured, and his eagerness to preserve Flint’s life, even at the expense of theirs. Billy could smell it on him then: infection, a fucking sickness. Flint had claimed another. What use, he had thought ruefully, were Homer’s sirens when it was the captain himself sending up the call, driving his own men against the rocks.

“He tell you you were past your prime?”

Flint offers Bill a quick warning glance, though it's tempered by the grin that follows – all teeth. Billy chooses his next words carefully.

“Did you think I owed you something?” Billy’s voice is quiet, deadly serious. He needs to know. He’s needed to know for a long time now. 

Flint snorts. “You? Never.”

And there it is, hungry and awakened inside of him: that easy hatred Billy has courted and clung to since the _Scarborough_ picked him up. Since he returned to Nassau and the first thing he remembers trying to process was, _Gates is gone_ – Silver of all people to deliver the news. He had been grateful then he was too tired to cry, to do anything more than sit there and take it. Every part of him had felt dried out and roughed up, painfully used and left to rot. His eyes were gritty and bloodshot and Silver had stood unnecessary guard over him. The hatred had been right there, monstrous and demanding, but also patient. It’s here again, in the room with them, the sort of thing if tangible a man could gather and hold tight in his fist, like the pulsing and bleeding heart ripped from an enemy’s chest.

Neither man speaks, unwilling to interrupt the lie.

Flint’s eyes drift around the room, as if cataloging what he remembers of this place, perhaps of the woman who lived here. His gaze comes to rest on the book Billy left on the table. Billy has taken to reading from her collection in the evenings, whether he finds himself alone here or with company. The men give him a wide berth, as if by creating the legend of one man he has fashioned an equally formidable one for himself. A drunk Featherstone had once told him, “You’re a dangerous man who has lived too many fucking lives – a goddamn feral cat, you are.”

Too many lives – he might be on to something. 

Back when Billy had first been brought aboard the _Walrus_ , he would read the books Flint kept in his cabin. Gates would encourage him, like a guilty father ashamed not of the family business but its inheritance. If Flint ever knew it was Billy who borrowed his books – one at a time, so achingly careful with each, so many of the volumes read but ill-understood – he never said. Billy had always assumed he never knew, that Billy existed outside the captain’s notice, but he knows better now. He knows that as an impossibility. Nothing exists or moves in Flint’s domain without his express permission, tacit or otherwise. He had allowed Billy, an allowance that inspires no goodwill but rather adds to his resentment of him. 

Billy handles the books in Mrs. Barlow’s house with the same consideration. He slides them from the shelf, cracks their spines slowly and deliberately and pages through them. It’s a quiet life he has established here in Nassau, despite the violence he spreads with his own sedition.

Billy was raised lettered, good with reading and writing. He never had that compulsive thirst for knowledge he is sure would characterize smarter men, but he would read what was put before him, read whatever he might find within reach. Every now and again, small details read and learned from that other life resurface for him. _I was naked for a day; you will be naked for eternity_. _Hell is empty and all the devils are here_. The definition of the word _horizon_ – the line which divides all visible into two. Derived from the Greeks, he remembers, a separating circle. Billy always felt that way at sea, as if the ship itself was separate from the rest of the world, beholden to its own system of laws or lack thereof. There’s a foolish assumption that with piracy comes anarchy. Untrue, he knows, especially under the ranks of Captain Flint. Trade one system of laws for another, one ruler for the next. Maybe Billy isn’t as smart as he thinks he is, and maybe that means Flint is right, but he does know this: he knows better to want something more.

Divide all into two; there is no middle ground. Flint knows this, too – Billy can see it. That glint in Flint’s eye, here in this room, in her house. That glint, directed at him: if he can’t trust him, he’ll have to kill him.

The feeling, Billy thinks, is mutual.

 

 

 

 

 

He believes he’s dangerous, too.

 

 

 

 

 

“I have come to realize the difference between you and me,” Billy says. His body mirrors Flint’s, the both of them simultaneously lazy and primed.

Flint leans back in his chair, his arms crossed, an unconvinced and insincere grimace twisting his mouth. “There’s only one?”

Billy ignores him. “After all I have been through – after what has been done to me? By England, by men who think a thirst for power is the same as possessing it – I won’t let that happen to anyone else. It’s my duty to stop it. But you? Where I wish to end the suffering, you design to be the cause of it.” He thinks of Dufresne on the beach, how he had told him the same thing, only to be greeted by a look of disgust Flint does a better job of disguising through condescension.

“That man you had hanged in the square, tell me the extent of his suffering. Tell me who caused it. Tell me what you call that.”

“War.” Billy doesn’t miss a beat. “Necessary means to a greater end.”

“And I have no greater end in mind?”

“One beyond your own selfish gain? Beyond what reads most days as little more than a personal vendetta? I wouldn’t know.”

Flint and Billy aren’t the only ones to have suffered at the hands and the long reach of England (Billy doesn’t know the details, but he knows this house figures in it as well as its former occupant, chief relics for Flint and whatever it was that that England had done to him), but there’s an understanding earned between them on that front. There’s an understanding, if not mutual respect, that their experiences have earned them a personal stake. 

“I never knew the truth to be so pliant, save for in your mouth,” Flint spits. 

Billy raises his eyebrows, cocks his head. He knows he doesn’t need to enumerate each and every falsehood Flint has embroidered as truth over the years. “Feeling outmatched?”

Flint laughs, sharp and derisive and brief. “Hardly,” Flint says, but his face goes serious all the same. Another lie, Billy thinks. 

“You never did ask me again about Mrs. Barlow,” Flint says after a pause. Flint says her name mocking, a small private smile trying his mouth, more so over her than Billy, Billy outside the joke. He is always, he thinks, on the outside. “You are in her house, after all.”

Billy shrugs. “After everything, she didn’t seem to much matter.”

Another pause stretches, the silence more threatening than actual words. “Ask me again.” The command is there, even here, cloaked as casual conversation, Flint’s voice pitched low, quiet and demanding.

Billy toys with the empty cup left on the table before him, the width of his hand covering the rim. He lifts his gaze to Flint’s. “No. I don’t think I will.”

Flint arches an eyebrow. It is unclear to Billy if his surprise is genuine or feigned; Billy clutches the cup tighter. “You don’t care to know? I seem to recall quite clearly your desperately curious questions of me.”

“And I recall falling overboard.” He says it sharper than he wanted to, unclear if it was wise to say even that much. Not for fear of Flint’s potential wrath, but because it is a tell. He is not as calmly removed from all this as he would have both himself and Flint believe. He taps the cup down once against the table, hard, and then shakes his head, sits back in his seat, wills his heart rate back down. “I don’t care to hear any more of your stories. She was your wife, she was your concubine, you were hers. She was your prisoner, a witch, an escaped felon. She was Queen of fucking Spain – what’s it matter. What would that change.” He pauses, watches the lantern light flicker over the lines of Flint’s face. There is nothing there for him. “Your history does not interest me.”

“So it’s just us then, here in this room, with the present.”

“Yes,” Billy lies.

 

 

 

 

 

The worst thing about drowning was that Billy had to do it alone. 

He hit the water off the bowsprit hard. He had never unlearned the habit of survival, so he fought. He swam, and when that didn’t work, he gave himself over to the current, tried to float. His nose and his throat burned from the salt water, his lungs ached, muscles locked, the night dark, the sea briskly cold and the same, trying to draw over him, an unending funeral shroud.

Even torture was easier to endure. At least then you were afforded company. You could look at someone else and say, think: This is what you did to me. Do you see? This is what you did.

These men were the wrong object of his ire, but they were someone. He got it out of his system by the time he woke at the camp in Nassau, a different man than the one who fell. Look at what you fucking did to me.

 

 

 

 

 

“I am trying to figure here, Billy, what our way forward is.” 

They are speaking now of the future instead of the past. Flint speaks to Billy as if they are partners, though he still manages to come across both ominous and casual. It leaves Billy wary, lets him see this for what it is: a stand-off, both pairs of hands itching for weapons that aren’t there. 

“ _Our_ way?” Billy repeats. He shakes his head. “I don’t see why the future requires a joint venture of you and me.”

Billy doesn’t have a name for the emotion that flickers across Flint’s face. “No,” he says. “I suppose it doesn’t.”

Trust has never been malleable, something to be shaped by the two parties at this table. Trust, Billy thinks, is simple. It’s either there or it isn’t. You can either grab hold of it or it lets you slip away.

Billy watches him, Flint’s face hardening with resolve. He has reached a decision then. 

“Awhile back,” Flint says, “when we were becalmed, all of us on the threshold of hunger and thirst and madness, Silver told me, in confidence, something I now believe you should know. He told me of the plot he had engineered – a plot to steal the Urca gold out from under us."

The important thing, Billy tells himself, is not to react. He can’t say that he is surprised, but he finds that he is angry, less so at Silver than at Flint. 

“Did that inform your decision-making? Or, no. It couldn’t have. You didn’t know. So I ask you, Billy, if your moratorium on the past still holds. If you feel comfortable with the future you have forged, your name tied to his.” It doesn’t sound like a question to Billy, but rather a judgement.

Billy bites down on his temper, but he can still feel it rise to fill his mouth, acidic and hot.

“I’ve waited, for some time now,” Billy says, each word carefully measured, all pretense abandoned. “I have waited for this exact moment when I, when the men, no longer have any need of you.” Flint does not respond, at least not in any obvious way. He raises his chin, his face and his posture tight, self-contained and unyielding to him.

“I have waited,” he says again. “Each time I think we have arrived at the end, that Captain Flint has reached his limit, that his due has arrived, you manage to worm your way out of it. But there will come a time, when you have exhausted every place to hide, every place to run, any bargain to strike, and I will be there. I will be there to ensure you get what you deserve.”

Flint is still before he laughs, the sound breathless and cruel. His eyes are hard and bright in the lantern light.

“Won’t that be something,” he says.

Billy smiles back, that same cruelty warping his mouth. “Someone, somewhere – they will make you pay. And I want you to remember this moment. I want you to know that I will be there,” he says again, his voice hard. “I will be there to watch you die.” 

The smile sluices off of Flint’s face revealing the captain’s face of legend, the last thing a great many men have seen before reaching their own demise. “You hate me that much, why not just do it yourself. Why wait.”

And here they are, Billy thinks. The edge of violence the two of them have been dragging each other closer and closer to since Billy came back. Billy’s heart beats fast. He could end this, here and now. Billy wants to tell him that Flint hasn’t earned that, but he knows that isn’t true. The truth, he knows, is he –

“Unless, of course, you are too afraid.”

It’s like being shoved straight into a trap.

Billy stands too quickly, knocks his chair over when he springs to his feet. Flint rises with a deliberate slowness. He kicks the chair back away from him as he rises – the scrape against the floor before it falls too noisy, filling the small house, drowning out the storm outside.

Billy’s hands curl into fists at his sides; Flint holds his body sturdy and solid, as if he could take any hit Billy might throw at him. It’s difficult to read Flint’s face in the dark room, the shadows making his face that much more menacing and unknowable. That much more the stuff of myth.

Flint has always functioned better as a myth than a man. Limitless power comes with that, Billy thinks – to be otherworldly is to be beholden to no mortal man. So of course Flint liked the myth, liked to believe he himself could walk on water, had surfaced from the deep like Poseidon’s wrath manifest as man. Billy knows better. He’s still just that: a man.

Billy swallows. He catches the sudden hunger on Flint’s face as he watches him, the bob of his throat.

“Why wait?” Flint asks again. Billy lunges for him.

 

 

 

 

 

They gave Billy more than an opportunity to join the crew. They gave him a chance at revenge.

Gates had said to him: the best thing that’ll happen to you is you will forget all of this.

Flint had disagreed. He said, you will remember, and then he had handed his pistol to Billy. “Your choice,” he said. 

Billy cocked the hammer back. He took aim.

 

 

 

 

 

Billy threw the first punch.

The storm has finally moved in off the water. Wind gusts through the open windows, the lantern flickering. The window’s broken latch’s bangs incessantly, setting the tempo as they grapple together on the floor. Billy’s fist meets Flint’s jaw and Flint hisses, rears away from Billy, his legs kicking out to collide with Billy’s shin, making him snarl and curse in turn. Billy’s mouth bleeds when his teeth snag against his top lip, Flint’s elbow catching him off-guard. Billy brings his knee up against Flint’s gut, Billy’s head blissfully empty save for the single-minded mission to gain the upper-hand over Flint. Unclear who brought the other down to the ground after Billy’s first punch – his fist had crushed solidly, satisfyingly against Flint’s cheekbone; Flint’s reaction had been instantaneous, a swift upper cut; and then, Billy threw his full weight against Flint only for Flint to meet him halfway; and then, the floor.

Billy manages to get Flint under him. He holds him down, his knuckles scraped and bleeding, smearing when he wraps a hand around Flint’s throat. He can feel the tendons of Flint’s throat flex beneath his grip and he squeezes that much tighter, listens to the loud rasp of Flint’s breath. He’s not afraid. He’s not afraid, but his grip goes no tighter. He can’t catch his own breath, he can’t look away from Flint’s face, the dare right there in his eyes, the twist of his furious mouth when he says, “You fucking coward.” He takes full advantage of Billy’s hesitation– he head-butts him. They both gasp in pain, and Billy’s bruising hold slips as Flint reverses their positions. He knocks the wind out of Billy, pummeling him with a hard hit to the ribs, a knee to the stomach, and he bites his bottom lips too hard as his teeth clank together. He can taste the blood as he wheezes. 

Flint’s knee presses down uncomfortably on Billy’s thigh, holding him there. Flint doesn’t bother trying to restrain Billy’s arms (a losing battle that would be, and both men know it), but it’s not just about physical power now. That strange current between the two of them since Flint entered – for a long time now, if Billy wants to embrace honesty rather than revisionist history – has taken the forefront. It’s there, it’s carrying them. Billy could shove him off most likely, but then again, maybe that’s just another thing he’s misjudged about Flint. Flint, after all, does not fight fair. 

Billy grabs Flint by the shoulders and tries to push him off, but Flint holds Billy’s head down against the floor, his fingers dangerously close to his eye, his other hand pushing at Billy’s collarbone painfully. Billy reaches, tries to close his hands around Flint’s throat again, and as Billy tries to raise his hand, his fingers scratching at Flint’s neck, as he fights to lift his head, their mouths crash together in a sick pantomime of a kiss. It’s nothing more than their teeth knocking together, mouths hot and smearing. The shock of it rattles through Billy, two bodies meeting not in communion but in conflict – but what’s the difference? One is not the other’s opposite. Billy draws back from him, his hands dropping from Flint, but Flint does not move from him. The heel of his hand is still pressed crushingly against Billy’s jaw, an ugly and heated expression marring his face. It makes something twist in Billy’s gut, something he’s afraid to trust. For the first time since Flint has shown up here Billy truly feels he is on unsteady footing. Unsure not only of what comes next but what the game is here. Who is being exploited and why.

Flint’s gaze passes down to Billy mouth and then he is kissing him again, no less harsh than the first time, as if this is just another way to fight. Flint’s hand slips from Billy’s jaw to grip the back of his neck tightly, his other hand square in the center of Billy’s chest, pushing him down. Billy’s own hands grind into fists against the worn floorboards, an act of futility. Fight back, he tells himself, so he does: he kisses him back, opens his mouth to Flint. He doesn't know who’s blood he’s tasting, if it matters. If that means they are on equal footing. Flint’s coarse beard scratches against his own stubbled face, and a groan slips from him when Flint sucks at his tongue. Billy doesn’t want to think about any of this, what he’s doing to Flint, what he’s letting him do to him. That he wants it. He pushes his hips up against Flint’s thigh, the movement involuntary, outside the short leash of his control. Flint bites off on a sound that could have started as mockery but has bled into something true, without irony, and his own hips push back against Billy, as insistent as his mouth, his hands. As demanding as Billy has always known him to be. Billy doesn’t touch him; he keeps his bloodied hands pressed to the floor, as if there’s deniability to be found there. Their mouths are punishing, pursuing not apologies but payment through blunt force and brutality, a natural extension of both their earlier conversation and the fight that brought them here, down to the floor. Their mouths are noisy, the involuntary needy sounds that escape, as they gnash their teeth, and spit-slick crash together again and again.

Everything between them is violent, including Billy’s reaction to Flint’s hands on him. A shudder courses through him he can’t disguise once Flint has Billy’s pants dragged down below his hips, his cock half-hard and exposed. Flint’s teeth are bared at Billy’s throat, his breath hot against his skin. All Billy has ever tried to do is find a story, a truth, he can live with. This isn’t it. This can’t be it. The carriage of Billy’s body is tight and rigid, like this is impossible to imagine as anything worth wanting, belied by the low and surprised whine that breaks from him when Flint shifts against him, his thigh rubbing coarse against Billy’s cock. His chest quakes under Flint when he sucks in a harsh breath, his pulse pounding in his ears. Sex is just another act of violence, he tells himself. Why wouldn’t Flint use it against him.

Billy’s not foolish enough to think this has anything to do with him, not anything more than a desire to conquer, to put him in his place. Maybe it’s mutual, that desire. But his body betrays him, again and again. Perhaps that’s what Flint wanted: an eye for an eye, one betrayal worth another – Billy’s cock hard and leaking, every muscle crying out for release, his skin hot and prickling, his mouth bruised and hungry. It’s clumsy at first, Flint’s hand calloused and dry, but Billy still pushes into his grip. Flint releases him, spits into his own hand, and Billy chokes on a gasp before he even touches him again. 

Flint doesn’t say a word, but Billy can see it, that knowing expression on his face once he has Billy’s cock in his fist – his fingers tight around him but moving too slowly, without any rhythm, to afford Billy any relief – as if he has verified something he has always suspected but had not known for certain. “Fuck you,” Billy grits out, his teeth clenched tight. There’s blood on his chin; he doesn’t know if it’s his or Flint’s. His body pulls taut, barely under his control when Flint begins to pump his fist faster, rougher. His hips buck up into Flint’s hand all the same, Flint’s thumb working over the leaking head. Billy knocks his head back against the floor, hard, a surrender all its own. His hand reaches up from the floor to clutch at the damp back of Flint’s shirt.

“Good,” Flint says, unexpected and made all the more curious by his tone, low and pleased. Billy’s not entirely sure Flint even knows he said it out loud. He says it when Billy is close to coming, says it on the heels of the unbearably soft and needy sound that escapes from Billy’s mouth. He says the word once more, and Billy squeezes his eyes shut when he comes, unable to look at him, at anything. He can feel himself spill over Flint’s hand, against his own bared stomach. Flint rubs his hand off against the hem of Billy’s shirt, his stomach, the muscles fluttering.

Flint stills against him. He can feel Flint hard against his thigh (the muscles still jumping and trembling; it’s been a long time since he came with someone else rather than his own hand), but Flint doesn’t move. Flint’s gasp is indignant when Billy’s fingers brush against the hard ridge of him, before he jars himself away. As if there’s shame to be found in that for him. Not the desire, but the gratification of it. Billy looks at him, both their eyes dark, both out of breath.

Flint pulls further back on his heels, and, no. Billy feels the that familiar flush of tired and resentful anger. That’s not fair. He doesn’t get to do this to him. He doesn’t get to do this without consequences.

Billy drags his stained shirt off. He rears up, he kisses Flint, hard, demanding, unsure what he wants from him, just knowing that he does. He gives himself over to that sickening feedback loop of mutated history and curdled want, his hand covering Flint’s jaw. The kiss is ugly from the start and Flint’s body twists in Billy’s grasp. 

He gets Flint’s belt off with a heavy clank, Flint wide-eyed, breathing hard, an animal in a trap. He gets his pants down, his cock fat, wet at the tip, and Flint makes a sound like he’s been gut shot, no resistance. Billy wants to call it a sound of defeat and knocks Flint to his back on the floor. He rubs his hips against Flint even though Billy’s too sensitive for it, even though it makes him hiss through his teeth. It’s worth it for the way Flint pants into his mouth, grabbing at Billy, pulling him tighter against him. Their hips grind; it feels like they are both trying to destroy each other. 

And he doesn’t think, that’s what he will tell himself later. He doesn’t think. He drags his mouth from Flint’s, drags it down his body, inhales quick at Flint’s surprised groan – and, fuck, isn’t that what he’s always been after? To find a way to knock him off center, find a way to show him he is the smarter man, that Flint can’t predict his every move, that there are parts to him that will always be unknowable because Flint will never look. In a way he never outgrew the young man who was first brought aboard the _Walrus_ : all he had wanted to do was leave his mark with Flint. Isn’t that all a legacy is?

It’s been awhile since Billy has sucked anyone off. He spent his entire grown life on ships among men. The obvious that comes with that: the fumbling below decks that never added up to any real satisfaction, but an eager mouth was better than your own hand, and reciprocity was expected. His mouth is awkward, inelegant, but Flint doesn’t seem to care, desperation making him just as sloppy and unabashed as Billy. Flint drags his fingers down Billy’s scalp, the intimacy of that single gesture more terrifying than anything else that has transpired between them. He ignores the nervous pulse through him. He swallows him down, deep in his throat, and tells himself it’s in defiance. 

“Fuck. Billy,” Flint says, the words clipped, his tone ruined. Like the words are dragged from him against his will, said without his express permission, in direct contrast to the near pliant slump of his body. Billy needs to hear it again, needs to hear more. He continues to suck and lick at Flint’s cock, the taste of him on the flat of his tongue. Spit dribbles down his chin; he finds Flint’s face unguarded and dark when he chances a look up at him. Flint’s gaze is fixed and unwavering on Billy, and a sound catches strangled when he meets Billy’s own. He swipes his fingers over Billy’s chin, rubs the spit, the drying blood down and under Billy’s jaw. Billy’s eyes flutter closed, and he swallows fast.

He makes Flint come. It is, he thinks, the first time he has ever made Flint do anything at all. 

 

 

 

 

 

The last time they saw each other – there was the beach, there was the weight of the treasure between them as they lugged it to shore. 

Billy said go; Flint listened. 

 

 

 

 

 

Billy rubs at his mouth with the back of his hand; it comes away wet.

They turn away from each other as they right themselves. If such a thing is possible – Billy feels as if he is at an uneven keel, a ship tossing in unfamiliar waters.

“We will discuss, in the morning, the goings-on of Nassau in my absence,” Flint says. Billy looks at him over his shoulder, is met by Flint’s military precision posture, his face tight as a mask.

Billy nods, attempts to reflect him back. “Captain,” he says. He can see it – the jumping pulse in Flint’s neck when he flinches at the title. Flint leaves him without a further word, the bedroom door slamming shut behind him.

It’s a hard-fought lesson he learned a long time ago – violence must be endured before anything worth having. The two separate, a line drawn between them, and they will lie to themselves and each other and call this a truce. Billy’s jaw aches, his mouth swollen and sore. Used. He does not know what sort of agreement the two of them have struck – fictional or real.

Division is a lie, Billy thinks. The horizon a lie, the same trick every sailor falls for at least once. Mistakes the sky for sea, misjudges the distance to shore. It’s all too possible for a man to hold two incompatible ideas inside himself. That you can both possess power while being crushed under its heel. You feel triumph and disappointment in equal measure. You can hate and you can –

The Barlow woman’s house is too crowded with the both of them in it. Billy starts when the shutter latch bangs against the windowsill. He knows. One line still remains. His eyes drift from the closed bedroom door to the chairs, still kicked over, around the table. If he can’t trust him, he’ll have to kill him. He blows the lantern out.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> widespindriftgaze @ tumblr


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